in Design
Hyphenation settings that don’t draw attention to themselves
Hyphenation makes justified text work, but only when it is quiet. The settings that keep it that way, and the breaks to avoid.
Hyphenation is what allows justified text to look even. Without it, the software has only whole words to work with, and word spacing swings between cramped and gaping. With too much of it, the right-hand edge of the page fills with little dashes and the reader starts to notice the machinery.
The aim is hyphenation that does its job and is never seen. That depends on a handful of settings and a final pass by eye.
The main settings
Layout programs such as Adobe InDesign offer broadly similar controls, even if the names vary.
Minimum word length. Short words should not be broken at all. Many book typesetters set this at six letters or more, so that a word must be reasonably long before the software will consider hyphenating it.
Minimum characters before and after the break. A break that leaves one or two letters on a line looks careless and makes the word hard to recognise. Settings of at least two before the hyphen and three after it are common, and many designers prefer three and three for book text. Leaving only a short fragment such as a two-letter ending on the next line is usually the thing to avoid.
Consecutive hyphens. A stack of hyphens at the ends of successive lines, sometimes called a ladder, is one of the most visible faults. Limiting consecutive hyphenated lines to two, or at most three, prevents it.
Hyphenate capitalised words. Breaking proper names is generally avoided, both because it looks odd and because the software’s dictionary may not know how to break them. Turning this option off is a sensible default.
Last word and across pages. It is good practice to avoid hyphenating the last word of a paragraph, and to avoid a hyphen at the foot of a right-hand page, where the reader has to turn over to finish the word. Some software can control the first automatically; the second usually needs checking by eye.
The dictionary matters
Software hyphenates using a language dictionary, and the choice of language changes the result. British and American conventions for where words break are not identical: British practice has traditionally leaned more on the structure and origins of words, American practice more on pronunciation. A book set in UK English should use a UK English dictionary, and specialist words, names and invented terms should be added to a user dictionary with their preferred breaks, or marked so they never break.
Composition does much of the work
Hyphenation settings interact with justification. A paragraph-level composer, which weighs all the possible breaks in a paragraph together, produces far better results than one that sets each line in isolation. Tightening the limits on word spacing makes the software more willing to hyphenate; loosening them makes it less willing. There is a balance to find, and it differs from one typeface and measure to another.
A useful approach is to set a couple of chapters with the proposed settings, then look at the pages for two things at once: the evenness of the word spacing and the frequency of hyphens. If spacing is loose, allow a little more hyphenation. If hyphens are frequent, look first at the measure and type size before loosening the spacing.
Breaks to avoid by eye
Some hyphenations are technically correct but read badly. A break that creates a different word at the end of the line, or an unfortunate one, can make the reader stumble. Hyphenating an already hyphenated compound at a second point, splitting numbers or dates, or breaking a URL at a hyphen that is not part of it will all cause confusion.
A proofreader will catch many of these, but a typesetter should look for them first. Hyphens are small, and a reader should never have cause to think about them.